﻿Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed the election is rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton. His running mate said the conspiracy lies in the media, not the system.

Photo: John Minchillo, STF

County and state election administrators and experts across the country sought to reassure voters on Sunday that the democratic process works and that the November election would be legitimate, even as Republican nominee Donald Trump escalated claims this weekend that it was "rigged" against him.

His allegations were met by push back even within his own party, with a spokeswoman for the nation's highest-ranking GOP official, House Speaker Paul Ryan, saying he remained "fully confident" in the election system. Trump's running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, similarly seemed to try instill voter confidence, saying on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday they would "absolutely accept the result of the election." The sense of a rigged election, he said, is in the "bias in the national media."

Just hours later, however, Trump intensified such assertions, saying it was not only because of a media campaign against him, as he has repeatedly claimed, but because corruption would also unfold in local precincts.

"This election absolutely is being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD," he wrote on Twitter.

Human error anticipated

Such accusations are unprecedented in modern American politics and sound like they belong in some Latin American countries such as Mexico or Venezuela that are still working out kinks in their democratic systems, said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.

"It plays to the worst fears of many voters," he said.

In reality, he said voter fraud is rare and extremely difficult, if not impossible, to orchestrate on a broad enough spectrum to sway a national election - even as efforts to boost turnout have indeed increased opportunities for fraud at a local level.

Nationally, however, "you would need technology that makes Jason Bourne and James Bond green with envy," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston.

In addition to high-tech gadgets, local precinct judges and volunteers who oversee the voting areas would have to be involved, as would lawyers, political operators and party-poll watchers across the country.

"The system anticipates human beings run the election and make mistakes and there is some dishonesty. The system provides multiple levels of visibility and protection against those types of occurrences," said Chris Ashby, a Republican lawyer in Washington, D.C., who specializes in election law. "In order for an entire election to be rigged, you would have to have the participation of so many people across so many polling places who represent both political parties and no parties at all."

Election processes differ by state. Some have centralized systems, which are more vulnerable to hacking. Though some 20 states have reported attempted hacks of their voter registration files, officials at the Texas Attorney General's Office and with state police who have investigated such allegations in the past said Sunday there has been no indication of such a compromise here.

254 different voting systems

In Texas, the entire voting process is managed and supervised by each of the 254 counties. As such, it would be "nearly impossible" to execute fraud on a statewide level, said Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Carlos Cascos.

Counties here also use different voting methods, including various types of machines.

In Harris County, the voter registration database is kept offline and a backup is saved every day, said County Clerk Stan Stanart, who has tried to assuage voters about the process in recent weeks.

Terminals are also not connected to the internet. Instead each of the county's 765 polling locations will have up to 12 electronic tablets wired into a central terminal, along with a backup. They'll arrive each morning with a security seal. Records of all digital ballots cast at the location are kept.

Data from each terminal's memory card is uploaded from a separate laptop through a "secure county network" at four depositories across the county. Though critics have questioned the safety of such networks, no actual breaches are known. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has also announced it would have a special cyber security team overseeing this year's election.

To guard against partisan foul play, two election judges - one appointed by each major party - oversee each Harris County polling place, the depositories, and the final count at the clerk's office. In all, about 6,000 staff and volunteers help.

Still, human error does occur, said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Harris County who previously served as tax assessor. He noted two election clerks were recently indicted and that one of his deputy voter registrars was convicted of altering over 100 existing voter registration applications. But he said the county's electronic voting system is one of the best in the country and subject to rigorous checks as well as ultimately approved by an official canvas.

'Farfetched scenarios'

Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir, who was accused last year of violating state law in the recount of a City Council election, cautioned voters not to be fooled or distracted by what she said were "farfetched scenarios."

The complaint against her was overruled after the judge found that defeated District 4 candidate Laura Pressley had not identified evidence sufficient to question or overturn the election result.

"There are many safeguards in our system," DeBeauvoir said. "The reality is that it's extremely unlikely that any voter will be effected by other people performing shenanigans."

A spokesman for Gov. Greg Abbott, who has championed curbing voter fraud in the past, had no immediate comment. But Abbott on Saturday tweeted a Fort Worth-Star Telegram story about a state investigation into voter-fraud allegations in Tarrant County.

"Texas will crack down at cheating at the ballot box," Abbott said in his tweet.

The focus of that inquiry is on mail-in ballots, which allow people to vote from their homes without any verification of identity. Supporters of mail ballots have insisted they are crucial for senior citizens, military personnel and other Texans living overseas, despite criticism that the practice could encourage fraud by allowing people to fill out and mail in another's ballot.

The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature has also extensively debated curbing voter fraud as a reason to enact a voter ID law that was recently invalidated by a federal court. Critics said the law illegally suppressed minority voting.

Robert Parten, a former elections administrator for Tarrant County who has been involved in the process for more than 40 years until he retired in 2013, said few allegations of voter fraud are ever serious enough to warrant an investigation.

"In that entire time, I can count on one hand the number of people who actually had some kind of suit filed against them," he said.

Clinton didn't have any public events this weekend, but her running mate Tim Kaine responded to Trump's assertions at a Miami rally Saturday.

"Now that he thinks he's going to lose, he's going around and saying, 'Oh, the whole thing's rigged,' " the Virginia senator said, calling on supporters to provide such a wide margin of victory that accusations of a stolen election won't stick. "We've got to make sure that the margin that he loses by is so big and so clear and so powerful and so unmistakable."